HERCULEZ’S STRENGTH? PERSISTENCE

Soccer standout returns to roots as U.S. men take on Guatemala at Qualcomm

Herculez Gomez is sitting on a couch in the lobby of a downtown San Diego hotel, reminiscing about how he once slept on one.

How a buddy coaxed him into attending an open tryout for a new minor-league pro team in San Diego 11 years ago, how he was sick and didn’t want to go, how his buddy loaded him into the car anyway in the pre-dawn darkness of Las Vegas and drove through the desert while he slept in the passenger seat. How he was paid $500 a month and housed at a “kind of foster home for players” — some nights sleeping on the living room couch, some nights in a bedroom if one was available.

How he bounced in and out of Major League Soccer reserve teams, making $16,500 per year (not month). How his car was essentially his closet. How after being cut from MLS the first time he returned to San Diego and played for the indoor Sockers while working at the UTC mall in the mornings and coaching two youth teams in Chula Vista in the afternoons, only for the Sockers to fold after 10 games.

And how surreal it all seems now, sitting in this hotel lobby a decade later, wearing U.S. national soccer team gear. He’s a 31-year-old forward, here for a friendly against Guatemala on Friday night at Qualcomm Stadium ahead of the CONCACAF Gold Cup. If he wasn’t called to the national team, he’d be across the street at another downtown hotel with his new Mexican pro team, the Tijuana Xoloitzcuintles, prepping for Saturday’s game at Petco Park against Club America.

“My life has completely changed,” he says, “and I’m on the opposite end of the spectrum from where I started. You think about dreams you have in any profession, where you start, where you want to end, what you want to achieve. It really has been nothing short of miraculous, kind of how it’s all snowballed into this now.

“Yeah, to come back here it does feel like I’ve almost come back full circle. Absolutely.”

Maybe Gomez would have made the 2010 World Cup team anyway had his friend not seen an Internet posting for open tryouts for the San Diego Gauchos in 2002 and loaded him into the car. Maybe Gomez would have played in the CONCACAF Champions League final, won a Liga MX title, become the first U.S. player to claim a scoring title in a first-division pro league and met three different U.S. presidents.

But probably, he wouldn’t.

“It’s crazy,” Gomez says, “when you think about how this all started.”

Gomez was a kid who was never supposed to make it. He never played for tony youth clubs. He wasn’t part of U.S. Soccer’s Olympic Development Program because his family couldn’t afford it. He didn’t play in college. And when he washed out in Mexico’s minor leagues after high school, he returned to Las Vegas, figuring his soccer dreams were extinguished. Reality beckoned.

“It just proves that you can make it through in different ways,” U.S. national coach Jurgen Klinsmann said earlier this week. “Herculez is a personality, a character, that has always done it his way. … Everyone writes his own story, you know?”